Mind Over Matter

 Mind Over Matter –

 Consciousness and the Nature of Reality

By Jeff Street

Reality is not what it appears — the ancients knew it, pioneering physicists of the early 2Oth century knew it, and current leading edge scientists are proving it — all is mind.

The Big Questions and The Modern Scientific Worldview

Throughout the ages, Mankind has been trying to answer the big questions — What is the nature of existence and reality, what are we, and why are we here?  In our current age, with the ascendance of the ideology of scientific materialism, we have a strong tendency to reject anything that doesn’t fit our materialistic paradigm and label it as “mystical”.  We have become mesmerized by the material world.  Materialism and consumerism run rampant in our society. Lured by the apparent success of the reductionist method that we have used to analyze and understand our world, we have come to view the universe as purely a physical system, working something like a great machine, and with matter being the fundamental substance of reality.

    “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.” ~Nikola Tesla

Our scientific analytical methods have certainly been successful and have led us to understand the inner workings of matter well enough to create many useful technologies.  But these successes have erroneously led us to conclude that our materialistic view of the universe must be correct and reject other ideas as “mystical” and backward.

The materialistic paradigm persists in the popular and scientific thought despite plenty of evidence that it is indeed not true.  The Theory of Relativity and Quantum Physics have both shown that energy is more fundamental than matter.  The pioneers of quantum physics in the early 20th century — Max Planck, Albert Einstein, and others — all came to the same conclusion — that everything is energy and that somehow consciousness is intimately intertwined with it.  And yet this insight seems to have been lost since then.  Physicists are still chasing the fundamental “particle”, and focusing on material phenomena rather than focusing on what energy is, how it forms matter, and what other forms can it take.

And modern science is still largely ignoring the role of consciousness, despite the observations of quantum phenomena that strongly suggest that consciousness is intimately related to the nature of reality.  Mainstream science continues to assume that reality is objective, EG; that it exists independent of the consciousness of the observer despite much evidence to the contrary, and the conclusions of many pioneers of physics.

The accomplished English physicist, astronomer and mathematician, Sir James Jeans, had this to say — “I incline to the idealistic theory that consciousness is fundamental, and that the material universe is derivative from consciousness, not consciousness from the material universe… In general the universe seems to me to be nearer to a great thought than to a great machine. It may well be, it seems to me, that each individual consciousness ought to be compared to a brain-cell in a universal mind.”  And he wasn’t alone, below Max Plank shares a similar viewpoint.

Reality is Not What it Appears

Consciousness is probably the most mysterious and significant phenomena in the universe, so to treat it as irrelevant to understanding reality is a major mistake.  In fact, there have been some very profound experiments (see this video about these experiments) that leave very little doubt that there is an intimate relationship between consciousness and reality.  Leading some to conclude that consciousness is the fundamental substance of the universe, as many esoteric and mystical philosophies throughout the ages have claimed in one way or another.

It’s not surprising that we might get stuck on the idea that matter is the fundamental substance of reality because this idea is just a natural consequence of our perceptual limitations.  Our sensory apparatus — sight, hearing, smell, touch — provide us a useful representation of the external world, but when it comes to our primary sensory channel, vision, it is well known that we are “seeing” only are very narrow band of energies.  Our eyes detect electromagnetic energy frequencies and convert them to the images and colors that we perceive.  But our eyes only detect an extremely small portion of those frequencies, less than 0.00018%.  And we are only “seeing” the clumps of energy condensed to a slow vibration (EG; matter).  We can’t see all the rest of the energy and how everything is interconnected patterns of energy.

    “All matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration.” ~Bill Hicks

Despite the lesson that the unseen phenomena of electromagnetic radiation should be teaching us we are still largely unaware of how the limitations of our sensory apparatus have conditioned our models of reality.  There are many more unseen phenomena we have yet to detect and understand.  Our visual perceptions are far less complete than we have ever imagined, and this has led to a tenacious conceptual bias that has colored our models of reality.  This bias is interfering with formulating a broader, deeper more accurate model including tackling the big question we’ve been avoiding — what is consciousness and how it is related to reality.

Ancient Cosmological Philosophies – All is Mind

Long before our current scientific age, and for much longer, there were many cultures with a vastly different view of the cosmos.  They saw the universe as intelligent and alive in it’s very fabric; they thought of the cosmos as a great mind, and that our earthly reality was in some sense a grand illusion.  Philosophy continues to explore the nature of reality and consciousness and debate many alternate perspectives.  Amongst contemporary schools of thought, there are those that resonant with the ancient idea that “all is mind”.  This idea has not been lost completely.

    “The stream of knowledge is heading toward a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter, we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter. Get over it, and accept the inarguable conclusion. The universe is immaterial-mental and spiritual.” ~Sir James Jeans, Physicist

Science was born from philosophy but it has long since gone its separate way — science focusing on how things work and FACTS and philosophy focusing on MEANING. This is why humanity has lost its heart and it’s soul — facts without meaning are like a ship without a rudder.

Modern science would have us believe that life, consciousness, and intelligence somehow emerged from the mechanizations of the universe by random chance, however improbable. That they were essentially accidents, and hence have no deeper meaning. Yet there are those who believe that it is all deeply meaningful and by design, and hence purposeful.

About the Author

Jeff Street awakened about a year and a half ago, after having been an atheist/agnostic scientist type with absolutely no spiritual beliefs for most of his life. After many ‘magical’ new experiences, he is now passionate about learning and sharing his insights about spirituality and metaphysics on his blog www.divine-cosmos.net. You can also follow Jeff on Facebook via www.Facebook.com/DivineCosmoz

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